SH!T WENT DOWN: The Fall of the Roman Empire

And the Dark Age that followed

That subtitle is sure to piss off some medieval historians, who’ve been rallying around “Stop calling it the fucking Dark Ages!” And I’m sorry but fuck you I’ve read your explanations and I’m still team Dark Ages and ima tell you why. But first, let’s get into this Roman Empire trend that’s blowing up social media like Jordan Peterson just saw a Bud Light commercial. I guess guys are always thinking about the Roman Empire, and women are all the fuck? Why?

I think I know why. It’s because it was ancient, and it was white.

“Ancient history” is from about five thousand years ago, when we started writing shit down, to about fifteen hundred years ago, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Ancient shit just seems cool, because comparatively little was recorded and we needed Indiana Jones to figure that shit out for us. And when us white dudes want to think about an ancient empire, our thoughts naturally turn to Rome, which wasn't really all that white but … details.

There was an absolute assload of ancient empires. About two dozen before Rome even showed up as a lowly kingdom five centuries before Jeebus. All these next few dates are B.C.E.: The Marhasi Empire was in the Iranian plateau from 2550 to 1900. The Akkadian Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean from 2334 to 2154. The Xia Dynasty showed up in central China in 2070 and lasted almost 500 years. Babylonia was in the same area as the Akkadian, beginning in 1792 and lasted a whopping 1,166 years. And then there was the Shang Dynasty and the Egyptian Empire and also Hittite, Assyria, Elamite, Kush, Judah, Zhou, Carthaginian, Achaemenid et-fucking-cetera.

Then Rome shows up and white boys start to pay attention. I mean, we did have that shit culturally rammed down our throats from movies like Spartacus and white lady Cleopatra and a non-Jewish guy as Ben-Hur and Australian-accented Spaniard Gladiator. And don’t forget all the HBO sex and violence in two seasons of Rome. Oh shit I forgot about Caligula. I think a lot of people would like to forget that movie.

Granted, the Roman Empire did some memorable shit. They had their badass legions kicking all sorts of ass and don’t forget about the rampant orgies that likely didn’t happen but were a story made up by the Church to make non-Christians look bad. Romans also built some cool shit like the Colosseum where you could occasionally watch people fight to the death but only sometimes because gladiators are fucking expensive. Still, that building isn’t as cool as the 481-foot-tall Great Pyramid of Giza, which stood as the tallest structure for damn near four millennia until some French dude named Gustave Eiffel decided to get an engineering degree. The central spire on the Lincoln Cathedral reaching 525 feet that was completed in 1311 doesn’t count.

Anyfuckingway, they did conquer a lot of territory and had two centuries of that Pax Romana thing which is Latin for we killed the shit out of anyone who looked sideways at us and now everyone is too afraid of our badass selves to dare make war. Although that was a relative comparison. It wasn’t really a time of peace, just less war than usual via imperialist domination.

The Pax Romana ended with the death of Marcus Aurelius, the “Last of the Five Good Emperors,” which is another relative comparison, in 180 CE. Marcus would later live on via his writings about stoicism that would be adopted by young white dude life coaches who lost everything in the crypto crash yet still pay eight bucks a month for Twitter. If I hear one more fucking bro-dude say “The obstacle is the way” …

The Roman Empire also had the newfangled concrete and fancy roads and indoor plumbing but oops we made the pipes out of lead and now people are fucking crazy.

But I think a lot of middle-aged white dudes fancy thinking about the Roman Empire because it was a time when middle-aged white dudes with a modicum of power got to do whatever the fuck they wanted. America especially is into alabaster autocracy these days and plenty of Trumpanzees would probably love it if their Jaundiced Jesus started using NASCAR venues to feed liberals to the lions. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to be interested in the history of the Roman Empire, but don’t get a fucking erection for it, k?

Enough of that. Let’s get to how shit fell apart and led to a thousand years of fucking dark age.

The Roman Empire split in 285 because it was becoming too large to manage as a single entity, so it was split between the “Greek East” and the “Latin West.” The Greek East, which would be named the Byzantine Empire, was centered in not-yet-called Istanbul and lasted a full millennia after the fall of the Western Roman Empire until Ottomans blew the shit out of the walls of Constantinople with their fancy new shooty kaboom toys in 1453.

But the West rapidly went to shit after the split. By the early fourth century there were invading Goths and I’m not talking about the kind who dress cool and listen to The Cure. Then there was some Hun named Attila who you may have heard of. Also throw in some internal division, plagues, and Vandals vandalizing shit, and by 476 that was a wrap on the imperialistic party time.

Guess what happened then. A fucking power vacuum is what happened. And guess who had the power to fill that vacuum. The Catholic Fucking Church. You don’t want me calling the medieval period the Dark Ages? Game on, motherfucker. Let’s do this.

To be clear, I’m specifically talking about Western Europe, because of how it compared to other parts of the world during this era was indeed fucking dark. But first, we must bust a myth about where the term Dark Ages came from.

Wait. Before we do that I just want to mention that if you’re enjoying this piece please know that I wrote a book titled On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down and you can order that now or keep reading because sure as shit I’m gonna remind you about it at the end of this story.

Okay back to the stupid origin of Dark Ages.

Saying shit was dark began with this fourteenth century Italian scholar named Francesco Petrarca aka Petrarch who was whining about how there was no good literature since the times of Greek and Roman ascendancy. That’s like me, who was a teen in the 1980s, hearing Nirvana for the first time and saying what the fuck is this grungy bullshit? Needs more synth.

Then in the early seventeenth century an Italian cardinal and Catholic Church historian used the term Dark Ages to refer to a specific period of turmoil from the late ninth to the middle of the eleventh century. And then that shit snowballed cuz there was a Renaissance and an Enlightenment and people were like well fuck that entire thousand years since Rome was just a bunch of backwardass motherfuckers so we’re going to call it all a Dark Age because we’re so cool and enlightened now.

Okay. It’s not that accurate. I get how academics whose job it is to micro-analyze shit would take issue with the term. From an academic perspective, I accept that the name isn’t a good one. But I ain’t no fuckin’ academic. I stopped after the master’s degree in history and I write this shit for fun and money (buy my book!) and I have a hate-on for the Catholic Church so I’m going to focus on their anti-science / anti-learning / do what we fucking tells ya and don’t ask questions bullshit that followed the fall of Rome.

In the fourth century Rome went from hey let’s kill all the Christians to actually they’re becoming a powerful political force so we’re gonna team up instead and make it the official religion. Then when the Roman Empire was toast the Church was all you will respect my authoritay! They became the dominant force in Western Europe for the next thousand years, and if you thought those anti-vaccine horse-paste-eating Joe Rogan fans were some anti-science semi-sentient skidmarks, then I got news for ya.

The Ancient Greeks had been into a rational examination of the world, separate from religion. Christianity was all that shit makes us uncomfortable and doesn’t gibe with us telling you you’ll go to hell if you don’t give us money and only use your penis in a way we say is okay. All the answers to life, the universe, and everything were to be found in the Scriptures. But you can’t read those Scriptures because you don’t know Latin so you’ll just have to take your priest’s word for what they say.

In Western Europe, the Church held a monopoly on learning, and they were restrictive as all shit. As an example, in thirteenth century Paris some philosophers began toying with the idea that reason was the path to truth, and the Catholic Church was all yeah absolutely fucking not. Starting in 1210 the Church began to issue a series of “condemnations” that a Florida school administrator would have loved, because it was all about not reading stuff that went against God. Aristotle? Fuck that guy. Do you want to be set on fire? Because reading Aristotle will get you set on fire. Over the next seven decades the list of shit not to do grew and grew until the year 1277 when the Bishop of Paris laid out 219 things you weren’t allowed to believe.

Meanwhile, Islam was having a Golden Age.

Baghdad was the center of it, under the Abbasid Caliphate, which began late in the eighth century and lasted almost half a millennium. At its peak the city’s population exceeded a million people, which was a shitload of folks for back then. It was a center of learning, with Islamic scholars from around the world visiting to share their knowledge in areas of law, education, philosophy, physics, math, astronomy, geography, biology, and a bunch of other subjects I wasn’t much good at. Who knows how long it would have lasted if a Mongol horde hadn’t decided to wreck it all in 1258. You’re pissed about the loss of the Library of Alexandria? The loss of the Grand Library of Baghdad was at least as catastrophic.

And it wasn’t just Islam. China and Japan had their inventive shit together as well during that time. When you compare Western Europe during the medieval period to what was happening in the Middle East and Asia, yeah it kinda seems like a dark age of people embracing being dumb as fuck.  

And it was actually Islam that helped pull Europe out of it.

Islamic scholars had translated the works of Ancient Greece into Arabic, and from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries what is now Spain was mostly occupied by Islamic forces, and it was via that route that the science-type learnin’ slowly filtered into Europe and had some people saying hey maybe the Church is just a little bit full of shit.

Meanwhile, the Church was really big on preaching about the horrors of hell. The typical medieval peasant or serf was regularly brainwashed into being way more concerned with avoiding the eternal torment of hell than where their next meal was coming from. And anyone who questioned Church authority or doctrine got to experience hellish horrors in this life. Lotta people got set on fire for praying wrong, or, like, for having a third nipple.

By the time Martin Luther showed up in the early sixteenth century and got all pissed off about indulgences—buying you or a dead loved one’s way out of hell—being sold in a way that would make a used car salesman proud, the pope had tremendous power not over just religious life, but he was also a major landowner with significant economic and political power.

Then some German monk says no this is bullshit you can’t buy your way into heaven it’s all about faith. I mean Luther was full of shit too because I’m pretty sure heaven doesn’t exist just being a good person is its own reward. Anyway, with so much money and power at stake the Church was all how fucking dare he and the next couple hundred years were a fucktacular shitnado of ass with Catholics and Protestants killing the absolute shit out of each other over how to do the Jesus stuff.

But at least people started questioning the Church and science got to be taken more seriously and now we have motorcycles and antibiotics and you can watch cat videos while you poop.

Please buy my sweary fucking history book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. Makes a great gift, so buy five. I’ll settle for three.

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